iTunes crashes on startup under Vista

I had an odd problem today, I logged on to begin my day’s work and plugged in my iPod as per normal. iTunes crashes, Vista tries to recover. iTunes closes. iTunes opens. iTunes crashes. Vista tries to recover.

As you can imagine that gets tiresome, so I tried repairing iTunes, reinstalling iTunes, installing older versions of iTunes, all to no avail. The solution in the end was to remove Quicktime and do a fresh install. I’ve not managed to find what caused the crash, so I’m assuming Quicktime has corrupted somehow. It’s possible the Apple Software Update was trying to upgrade it an crashed leaving it in a non-running state – but that’s just speculation.